We follow our hero, Earthworm Jim, as he attempts to foil the evil Psycrows' plan to steal away the beautiful Princess What's-Her-Name

Jumping from Gens 11b to BizHawk to make this movie was somewhat of a nightmare. I had previously completed this TAS on Gens months prior and importing the movie over, cause an immediate desync. Thankfully, re-doing the entire thing allowed me to find more time saves everywhere, so I see it as a blessing in disguise. As such, the re-record count on the BizHawk file is small. Combined with all the old movies and this one, I am well over 15K re-records

I originally started working on a TAS for Jim 2 back in 2013, but quickly lost interest after only finishing the first level, Anything but tangerines. Fast forward 2 years, and I got hit with a sudden drive to complete it and I completed it shortly after. Fast forward again, I get in contact with Athens, a known Jim speedrunner on twitch, and he and Falasion, another user on twitch, and I made new discoveries on both Jim 1 and 2. Later on, I completely re-do my old TAS and brought the time down more with new tricks and optimizations. The jump to Bizhawk allowed us to find more skips and clips, along with more optimizations, and brought down the time even more.

When Jim is jumping, if you initiate a snot swing, the game thinks Jim is standing on the floor and sets his value to 0 for a short amount of frames. Pressing jump again, allows you to jump again. Depending on what kind of floor you are standing, timing for getting the double jump has either a tight timing or lenient window

Initiating a snot swing while jumping, changes Jim's hitbox and allows him to go through certain walls and platforms

Gives Jim invincibility for a certain amount of time but keeps him in a static position

Orders you a large pepperoni pizza

Allows you to kill enemies faster than shooting and getting rid of obstacles without stopping

While it seems like I'm just jumping for no reason, if Jim is walking up steps or slopes, he takes longer to get to the top. Jumping up steps or slopes saves frames over just running

The very first thing you see, is Jim snot swinging from a snot trail up above. This is not normally possible as Jim's jump height isn't enough to reach up there. Using a double jump gives you enough height to reach up there. Another double jump is used to skip grabbing a pig to get rid of Bob and Number Four. There is one frame when Jim is falling off while falling from a hanging state, where he can jump, thus allowing a snot swing to save time. At the end of the level, you notice that Jim stops before Bob's fight scene, this is due to what we call, the Bob Despawn. Found by Athens by complete accident, having two squids on screen and shooting at the same time, causes Bob to not spawn when entering his cutscene trigger and ends the level immediately.

The soil has weird properties in this game. You can jump through them, ledge grab, land on certain clumps even though it seems like you can't, and can even soft lock you by trapping you in unshootable dirt. With shooting the dirt on the right side of the screen and a well placed jump, you can avoid going down the opening and having to shoot away soil to get back up. Here's our first clip, using the snot swing, allows you to grab onto soil from below and skip going around. On Genesis, it's sometimes faster to mash shoot the dirt to avoid lag from occurring, which is big help during certain sections. Using another double jump, allows us to grab the chip butty faster and doing a snot swing ledge grab, skips shooting soil. The next ledge grab is what we call, the hard jump, due to being very easy to miss. If you jump and try to grab onto the ledge, it doesn't work. You have to be in a falling state for a ledge grab to occur. Another snot swing ledge grab, more double jumping, and we are at Pedro, the boss of this level. This is the hardest thing to do on difficult, due to how much damage Pedro can do and how shooting his larva is a task on it's own. The fight is mostly getting Pedro to go where I want him to and taking enough damage to survive the following levels.

Five rounds on difficult, joy. Round 1 always has set patterns, you save time by dropping the flag and the first two puppies. Round 2 is where the randomness begins. Depending on where Jim stands and what he does with the puppies will determine what patterns you get. Taking damage from Peter saves time as opposed to catching all the puppies. The following rounds are just RNG manipulation to get the best patterns possible.

Getting the three health energies at the beginning leaves me with barely enough health to survive this level. The first thing you see is Jim floating around while waiting for the floating sheep, which we dub granny due to the noise they make when they pop. Manipulating the sheep to follow Jim over to the wall, allows Jim to clip into the wall and skip the entire level. Manipulating the next set of sheep to clip again, allows us to skip the quiz and make our way to the end of the level.

Manipulating the balloon to go where you want it go is a lot harder than it looks, especially when you are one hit away from dying. Shooting the snot obstacles before they spawn, alters their pattern. At the end of the level, Major Mucus is defeated at the earliest possible frame

Another five rounds of RNG hell, this puppy love is the worst when it comes to manipulation. Everything I do is for a reason, even though it seems like I'm just standing still or diving for nothing. Taking a death gives Jim all his health back and gives us more puppies to drop.

The first thing you notice, is that I do not pick up the cow as intended and go in a completely different path. Doing two double jumps in the section above, where the worm flag is, allows Jim to go past the barrier of the first milking barn, which extends really high up. Doing so, allows Jim to skip collecting all the cows and walk to the end of the level. Because you do not collect the first cow, the game does not load the next cow, which is needed for the barn gate to be lowered.

This level is the reason why we take a death in Puppy Love 2. If Jim hit any light bulb when his animation is bouncing upwards, he gets an extra boost up. If you finsh the level without collecting any worms, the game will give you two worms for Hammer Head, thus, it's faster to collect only one worm.

This level is completely broken. Originally, you have to collect two hamster wheels to power up incinerators so that Jim can go to the next section. Doing a somewhat precise jump, allows Jim to clip into the paper and fall under to the next section. Another jump toward the wall of paper, lets Jim fall to the final section and to the exit. Door chase is pretty straight forward, nothing really noteworthy here. Doing a double jump saves you from having to ledge grab to the top platform

The last five rounds of RNG hell. This puppy love was a nightmare to manipulate, but nothing like round 2. Dropping puppies and taking a beating from Peter saves time, nothing else to explain

Pretty straight forward level, just get to the end without taking too much damage. By whipping the off switch and snot swinging at certain times, lets Jim land on the final grills without needing to turn them off. Flaming Yawn is more tricky on difficult due to the quicksand-esque cheese on the pizza. Shooting and walking over the middle pepperoni, manipulates Flaming Yawn to stay in the middle and come down immediately, instead of attacking first.

The final level, Jim must race Psycrow to the alter to save Princess What's-Her-Name. Jumping after shooting the plasma gun, allows us to pass the fan blades from hitting Jim. One section of fan blades is spinning clockwise, which sends Jim right at a high rate of speed, letting him skip the falling walls or destroy them before they fall down. Because of weird hitboxes, you can jump in and out of the final fan blades without being damaged. Shooting the red oscillating balls, stops them in place for a short time, letting Jim collect the 'J' orb for a boost of acceleration. One last snot swing and a few jumps and once again, Psycrow has been thwarted.

In Tangerines, if you can somehow get enough height from a double jump, it's theoretically possible to skip the entire level. All three Puppy Loves are improvable if you can get consistent fast starts. Fast starts are when the game lags enough and psycrows feathers come out in a certain way after being hit with the bomb, if this happens, the next round text will show immediately and the next round begins. Every single round has the possibility of this happening, but we haven't figured out how to make it consistent. A possible better Pedro fight without taking as much damage to save time later. If you can somehow despawn the first cow in Udderly or go past the first gate without having the need to go from above, that would save a bit of time.

I hope you enjoy this run as much as I had while making it.

Samsara: Re-fixed the video/image embedding.

Truncated: Judging.